This paper describes some initial results of an ongoing investigation that seeks answers about the perception of the citizens of San Luis, Argentina about their participation in public affairs in the last six years (2015-2021). We want to know how citizens perceive their participation in the public policies promoted by the state with the administration of Governor Alberto Rodríguez Saa, governor of San Luis in the last six years, how they understand and qualify the communication and information that the government deploys towards the citizenship and what are the alternatives or instances of participation that citizens see as probably better or better. The qualitative questionnaire was launched in January 2021.
Increasing populism, personalization of politics, tribalist partisanship, and authoritarianism have lately put immense pressure on what have been termed "liberal" characteristics of citizenship, especially with regard to equal rights, access to legal status, as well as popular input in political decisions, a situation clearly exposed during the development of the Covid 19 Pandemic and the Argentine quarantine.
Since December 1983, the Rodríguez Saa brothers have governed the small province of San Luis in Argentina. For more than thirty-five years they built an almost seamless power and the Peronist Party in an electoral machine that won elections. Adolfo and Alberto Rodríguez Saa took turns in the exercise of the government previously obtaining the adhesion of the citizens. A characteristic of political populisms is their great capacity for symbolic inclusion and the Rodríguez Saá have been especially skilled at this, generating pride in "we San Luis". However, this inclusion is illusory since it is not true and yet it is probably experienced as participation by many citizens of the province, a fact that makes it more difficult to think of other more active and decisive forms of participation.
But there may also be ways to take advantage of the public policies of authoritarian, paternalistic and clientelistic governments that, although not consciously, involve veiled resistance, which can become openly expressed and politically channeled when the opportunity exists - or is believed to be. These phenomena occur in the broader context of the personalization of politics, the invisibility of the citizenry, the misinformation of the government, the adoption of authoritarian policies, as well as the division between online and offline citizenship (access to the technology is not egalitarian), with an increasing influence of social media technologies. The threats go through social inclusion and limitations to democratic participation due to digital gaps and government misinformation.
The awareness of the possibilities of participation in public decisions could promote mobilization in search of access, interaction and citizen participation. The scenario exposes a disjointed civil society that expresses a civic culture of disinterest in public issues, on the one hand, and on the other an absent social dialogue and with little possibility of participatory communication. A San Luis citizenship that appears as sleepy, fractured and disjointed, conditions in which it is incapable of offering resistance to the epic of the hegemonic state projects.
